Acts 14

Paul and Barnabas were messengers of Jesus Christ, entrusted with greatest news ever given to men. It is news that the Jews, of all people on the face of the earth, had been especially prepared to receive. As those who had the Old Testament Scriptures, synagogue worship, and some understanding of a coming Messiah, there was much in the heritage of their faith that should have been an aid in their understanding of the gospel. Some within the synagogue in Iconium did respond to the message of Christ with faith, but faith was never the universal response to the preaching of the Word.

Those who were against the message in that place recruited allies among the Gentiles, apparently predisposing them against these visitors. Still, we are told that Paul and Barnabas stayed there a long time, and that they spoke boldly for the Lord, and God granted attesting signs and wonders by their hands. People who are actors know how to produce the pretense of boldness and even sincerity, but these things are tested when the one who speaks faces significant suffering as a result of the message proclaimed. Sometimes a true messenger may have to sound the alarm for a strategic retreat. The actor will use this as an excuse to find a different part in another play. The committed servant of the Word will continue to proclaim the truth boldly wherever the Lord provides an open door.

Among the Gentiles in Lystra, Paul and Barnabas found an open door for teaching, and they amazed the people there by a miraculous healing of a man who had been lame from birth. The pagan worshipers, including the priest of Zeus, became convinced that Barnabas was Zeus, since he was the quieter of the two men, and the Paul was Hermes, and they wanted to sacrifice to them. This was not the kind of reaction that Paul and Barnabas desired. In fact they tore their clothes in an expression of righteous grief.

We laugh at this incident, but we need to realize that to receive the worship of the weak and the ignorant is a great temptation that has destroyed many men who went into some wilderness with the purpose of doing good things for others. Paul did not do this. He spoke of their common nature with the residents in that place. They also were men, but the one true and living God was alone to be worshipped. He is the Creator. He is the Almighty, the Provider of rain and food.

This would have seemed to be a great platform for further preaching of the truth about God and the Messiah, but at that point Jewish enemies of the gospel arrived from the other towns where Paul and Barnabas had previously preached, Antioch of Pisidia and Iconium, and they stirred up the recently adoring crowd against these two ambassadors of Jesus Christ to such a degree that they not only held off from worshipping them, but now thought it a reasonable course of action to stone Paul, formerly thought to be Hermes, to death. In fact, this is what they thought they had accomplished when they dragged his seemingly lifeless body out of the city. But he was not dead, and the Christian movement in those towns was not over. In fact, these bold messengers of Christ went back to these other places, and strengthened the disciples as those who were themselves willing to suffer in order to move toward the celestial city.

These kinds of trials are somehow appropriate for those who proclaim Jesus as King, and who genuinely call others to enter His glorious kingdom through the pathway of suffering. Before they left this region, Paul and Barnabas were able to appoint elders in these cities, entrusting them and the churches they would serve to the Lord, with prayer and fasting. The only way that anyone would be able to suffer this way, and continue to come back to the scene of the crime with any measure of joy is through belief in the Lord who suffered for us, and was victorious over sin and death. Without the truth of Christ and the message of salvation through Him, none of this would make any sense.

After these shocking events, Paul and Barnabas eventually made their may back to Antioch of Syria, and to the church there. It was by the grace of God that they had been sent out from that place some time before, and it was by the grace of God that their work was fulfilled. It was God who did this work through them, opening a door of faith for the Gentiles, but look at the way that God does His own kingdom work in this world! Victory comes through much opposition and through significant suffering. We might reasonably ask ourselves why the Almighty, who has created everything, and who gives us rain from the sky, fills our tables with good food, and is perfectly capable of filling our hearts with joy, should choose to do His great work of announcing the coming of the Age of Resurrection through so much pain.

We are reminded again that the pathway to victory matches the message of the kingdom and even the way of the King. We are also reminded that such trials authenticate the truth of the messengers who proclaim the message, so that when a door for the Word is truly opened by God, those who hear can see plainly that the ambassadors of this great Word believe it in the depths of their hearts, and that they are not merely good stage actors. They are willing to suffer so that others will know of this one King, who Himself suffered death for the glory that was set before Him.